suntimes.com May 21, 2003 BY LAURA EMERICK Staff Reporter

Pay close attention to that man behind the curtain. Andres Levin is Latin music's Professor Marvel, the studio wizard behind such diverse groups as Aterciopelados, El Gran Silencio, Arto Lindsay, Jorge Moreno and Ely Guerra. But his latest and perhaps greatest creation is the Latin music supergroup Yerba Buena.

Mixing African-based Latin styles such as rumba, son, soca and cumbia along with American hip-hop and funk, Yerba Buena represents a distinctly urban sound--one that Newsday, among others, has hailed as "an entirely new form of Latin music."

Though Levin is best known as an arranger, composer and producer, Yerba Buena gives him an opportunity to step out from behind the control board. "I had been thinking about creating a group for many years," said Levin, 33, a native of Venezuela who came to the United States in the mid-1980s. "I had produced lots of soul, hip-hop, Latin and Anglo artists. But I wanted to try a marriage of styles that hadn't been done before."

The core of the group's sound, however, hails from Mother Africa. "I focused on the triangle from Havana, Nigeria and New York," Levin said of Yerba Buena (whose name means "good herb," "mint" or Spanish slang for marijuana). "Historically it's the most logical base. We're tracing back history and exploring where these [Latin] rhythms came from."

Drawing on his extensive music industry contacts, he recruited lead vocalist Xiomara Laugart; percussionist Pedro Martinez; vocalists Eduardo "El Chino" Rodriguez and Cucu Diamantes (the stage name of Ileana Padron, Levin's wife); saxophonist Ron Blake, and trumpeter Rashwan Ross.

Levin, the group's music director, guitarist and programmer, envisioned Yerba Buena as a free-form collective, with guest artists dropping in on studio sessions and live sets. So for "President Alien," the band's debut album released last month on Razor & Tie, Yerba Buena is joined by jazz trumpeter Roy Hargove, vocalist-bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, guitarist Marc Ribot, flutist Dave Valentin, keyboardist Money Mark, rapper Stic, Brazilian percussionist-vocalist Carlinhos Brown and bassist Sebastian Steinberg (formerly of Soul Coughing).

It's a veritable United Nations of all-star musicians. "That's the way I work, layering and putting rhythm sections of people who wouldn't usually work together," Levin said. "One of the drummers we originally met in Nigeria, and then he showed up on my doorstep in New York. So we put him to work."

Over the last 18 months, the group honed its sound through club and concert dates while opening for such diverse artists as the Dave Matthews Band, Celia Cruz and Ray Charles. "The band developed a lot during the making of the record," Levin said. "Some joined halfway through the process. 'President Alien' represents a year and a half of people who flowed through my studio."

About that title: it plays on the term "resident alien"--an IRS designation for individuals who are not U.S. citizens but have a green card (work permit). "We came up with a long list of a hundred-plus names for our first disc," Levin said. "I loved the triple play on words. It has many meanings at the same time; it's not directly political, but it can be perceived as such." Besides, he added with a laugh, "Most of the people in our group have their green cards."

Many have compared the Yerba Buena sound with the heyday of the Fania All-Stars in the '70s, when Cuban, Puerto Rican and Nuyorican musicians developed a new fusion that would become known as salsa. "There are a lot of parallels," he said. "Yerba Buena is a very musician-driven project. Like in jazz, there are a lot of solos. That's something that doesn't happen much anymore."

Despite Levin's varied production skills, he views Yerba Buena as a live animal, not a studio creation. "Live, it takes on a whole new shape," he said. "The whole band takes off, and it feels more like a rock band. It's controlled chaos, Latin style."

Whatever you call Yerba Buena's sound, it does not adhere to the usual Latin music formulas. "Latin music is so stagnant these days," he said. "It's not the fault of the artists. Most of it is so radio-driven."

Levin knows all about the influence of radio programmers. It's an artistic land mine that he's tried to sidestep in his production work over the last dozen years (his credits also include David Byrne, the B-52's, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner and Ndegeocello).

If Yerba Buena, a creation of his New York-based production house Fun Machine, "works out in a commercial way, it could open doors" and help break down barriers in the hidebound Latin music world. "I hope artists will gravitate toward it."

Though he's happy to share the spotlight for a while, Levin intends to keep up his studio work. "I'm not going to stop producing, ever." He's working on Latin superstar Paulina Rubio's next album and producing a live version of his all-star tribute disc to Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, "Red Hot + Riot," at the Hollywood Bowl on July 20.

But for now, Yerba Buena remains his priority. "A lot of the alternative Latin movement has been geared to rock and electronica," he said. "I think everyone's gotta come together. That's where Yerba Buena comes in."

The Miami Herald Posted on Wed, May. 21, 2003 BY CARA BUCKLEY cbuckley@herald.com

Developers of the Four Seasons in Caracas must pay $4.87 million in damages for hacking their way into Four Seasons' computer system, accessing proprietary information and using the hotel company's logo without permission, a U.S. District Court in Miami has ruled.

Judge K. Michael Moore's decision, made last week, ended a tense months-long court battle between the Toronto-based Four Seasons and Consorcio Barr, a company headed by two Venezuelan brothers, Carlos and Lautaro Barrera.

At the heart of the dispute is control of the lush 21-story Four Seasons Caracas, built in the tony Altamira section of Venezuela's capital. Designed by Arquitectonica, and costing the Barreras $120 million, the hotel opened in January 2001 to accolades from the travel press, its status bolstered by being Four Seasons' first hotel in South America.

Almost immediately, though, the developers and Four Seasons began to spar.

The Barreras charged Four Seasons with overspending and mismanagement. Four Seasons countered that the Barreras were not paying their suppliers and, worse, were snooping through their computer files.

The Four Seasons in Caracas is the Barreras' first hotel. They are not connected with the Four Seasons condo/hotel in Miami, which is scheduled to open by the end of this year.

Four Seasons filed suit against Consorcio Barr in Miami in November 2001 and obtained an injunction one month later barring Consorcio Barr from accessing their computers. In December 2001, Four Seasons seized control of the financial management of the hotel. A Venezuela court ruled that financial control be restored to Consorcio Barr. The Four Seasons appealed, and last June stopped taking reservations at the hotel. Some 300 employees walked out in fury, demanding pay and attracting the Venezuelan media. By July, the hotel was empty, and has remained so ever since.

The trial in Miami, which ran from Dec. 16 to Jan. 30, was pitted with tension.

''Everything was contested,'' said Albert Xiques, who represented Four Seasons in the trial along with lawyers Juan Rodriguez and John Carey. ``The parties couldn't agree on the color of the sky.''

The Barreras' Miami lawyer, Eddie Palmer, presented evidence that the Four Season's supposed computer expert witness had fabricated his credentials. Consorcio Barr also accused the hotel management giant with attempting to strong-arm it into acquiescence.

But in his ruling, first reported in the Daily Business Review, Judge Moore said Consorcio Barr had stolen Four Seasons' trade secrets, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Electronic Communications Act, thus obtaining proprietary information, and unlawfully used Four Seasons' logo to rent hotel rooms and sell condo units, which are part of the hotel.

Along with the $4.87 million awarded in damages, Moore ruled that a magistrate judge review the accounting of Consorcio Barr's sales of condo units under Four Seasons' name. Moore also ordered Consorcio Barr to hand over all desktop and laptop computers, compact, floppy and zip disks.

The decision was devastating to the Barreras, who had hoped to line up new management for the hotel. Palmer said his clients would appeal. A spokeswoman for Four Seasons says the hotel company remains committed to managing the luxury resort.

''Our goal,'' Elizabeth Pizzinato, a spokeswoman for Four Seasons, wrote in an e-mail, ``is still that the hotel will be able to resume operation under Four Seasons management on a sound financial basis.''

Miami Herald Posted on Wed, May. 21, 2003 BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO fsantiago@herald.com

DESIGN DISTRICT EXHIBIT: Artist Sandra Ramos poses with installation 'Why do rain drops look so much like tears?' PEDRO PORTAL/EL NUEVO HERALD STAFF

Water bottles shaped like tears -- or are they rain drops, really? -- come down from the ceiling to the floor, their shadows on a white wall casting another layer of poetic deluge.

''Why do rain drops look so much like tears?'' murmurs artist Sandra Ramos, echoing the title of her installation piece, ¿Por qué se parecen tanto la lluvia y el llanto?

Like the Cuban Alice in Wonderland character Ramos created in another work, a series of engravings, the 33-year-old Havana artist stands before her poignant exhibit at the Miami Design District's Casas Riegner Gallery and marvels at the raves generated by her first solo show in the United States.

It's titled Heritage of the Fish after a soulful poem by the late exiled Cuban writer Gastón Baquero, Testamento del pez (The Fish's Last Will and Testament), in which a fish professes his devotion to the city he abandoned. In five installations using sculpture, photographic self-portraits, video and water -- lots of water -- Ramos comments on the losses fueled by exodus after exodus from the island.

''Water is a symbol of the situation in Cuba, of the sadness of separation, of the impotence we feel before things that happen and we cannot change,'' Ramos says. ``I've always used water in my work in some form, but lately, it has evolved from a secondary role to being a fundamental and symbolic element.''

Ramos' art, which has attracted attention from Mexico to Tokyo and has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is remarkable enough on its artistic merit alone. But it is even more so because she's a vanguard artist inside Cuba, part of a generation that in the past decade broke through some of the constraints of censorship and made art, music, movies and authored works reflective of the starkness of Cuban reality.

These artists, writers, musicians and cinematographers fueled a boom of Cuban culture now in jeopardy as the regime renews its repressive apparatus following the sentencing of 75 dissidents to long jail terms and the executions of three men who tried to commandeer a ferry to the United States.

''Who knows what's going to happen?'' says Ramos, who has now returned to that politically charged Havana.

Ramos' artwork -- paintings, etchings, installations -- mourn the choice of exile, the trauma of abandoning the island, the break-up of family ties, the loss of childhood, of love, of self.

In a chalcography, she creates an Alice in Wonderland-like girl from a picture of herself. The child waves to a plane taking off amid palm trees. It is titled: ''Y cuando todos se han ido, llega la soledad.'' And when all have left, comes loneliness.

In another engraving, the elegiac body of a woman is slumped grieving in the shape of the island of Cuba. A pitched-black one shows only the soft silhouette of a man and a woman on a raft.

The losses she reflects in her art are all too familiar.

In 1992, her then-husband, a set designer in Havana, decided to leave Cuba. He traveled to Italy, Venezuela and is now living in Miami.

''It was a very hard time for me,'' Ramos says. ``I had to decide whether I was going to follow him or not.''

She chose to stay in Cuba, living through the ''special period,'' the harshest economic times in recent Cuban history, infamous for food shortages that prompted people to invent unimaginable dishes.

''Can you believe grapefruit rinds marinaded and fried like steak?'' Ramos laughs.

The hardships fueled her art, she says. Without electricity in her apartment nor transportation to go back and forth, she remained in her studio from dawn to dusk pouring her grief, her sense of isolation into her work.

She broke into the international art scene in the mid-1990s after she participated in and curated several Havana biennials. International curators and art gallery owners who traveled to Cuba for the events saw her work and began showing it in their galleries and promoting her abroad.

Her pieces also have been exhibited at Art Basel, Art Miami and Art Chicago.

''She's an artist who surrenders her biography, her most intimate feelings and her own body to discuss social, political and cultural problems,'' Cuban art critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera has said of her work. ``She uses her portrait to personify the Cuban flag, the island, establishing a parallel between her personal situation and the suffering of her own country.''

Born in 1969 in Havana, Ramos lives in the once-grand neighborhood of Vedado in an old house that she and her husband restored from shambles and have furnished with antiques other Cubans have sold to them. She has a 1 ½-year-old daughter, Alexa.

The main piece in her living room used to be one of her favorite paintings, an old-fashioned crib suspended in a charcoal-gray nothingness by tiny pink wings. But a foreign visitor fell in love with the work and she sold it.

''It's very hard to sell something that has been a part of you for so long,'' she says.

Inspired by her best friend's grandmother, Gloria González, who was a painter, Ramos began her art studies at age 12 in Havana's Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas.

''I loved to go to her house and watch her paint,'' Ramos remembers.

She studied at the prestigious San Alejandro Academy and at Instituto Superior de Arte under the tutelage of the talented ''1980 generation,'' artists like José Bedia, Leandro Soto and Carlos Cárdenas -- all now exiled in the United States.

''There's an entire part of my life in Cuba up to 1994 that has all left, that is here now,'' Ramos says.

But leaving the island is not for her.

''Do you think that if you leave Cuba your art would suffer?'' someone in the art gallery audience asks her one evening during a lecture.

''Yes,'' Ramos readily answers. ``My work is too related to my life there and my life would change a lot if I left. Maybe someday I need to change, but not now.''

News You Can Use Thew Week, By Geoffrey Cowley

SARS may dominate the headlines, but it isn't the only weird disease on the World Health Organisation's radar screen. In central Africa, an outbreak of the dreaded Ebola fever has stretched into its fifth month. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a virulent new strain of avian flu wiped out entire chicken farms. Dutch farmers recently slaughtered 18 million birds in hopes of stopping the outbreak. Yet the bird flu spread to several provinces and jumped from poultry to pigs and even people, causing 83 human cases. Most of the infected people suffered only eye inflammation, but some developed respiratory illness.

N I P A H The virus is named after the location in Malaysia where it was first detected. Certain species of fruit bats, the natural hosts of the virus, passed it on to pigs, which transmitted to humans

SARS. Ebola. Avian flu. The parade of frightening new maladies continues, each one confirming that our species, for all its cleverness, still lives at the mercy of the microbe. It did not seem that way 30 years agoÑnot with smallpox largely defeated, AIDS still undreamed of and medical science evolving at an unprecedented clip. But even as optimists proclaimed victory over the germ, our mega cities, factory farms, jet planes and blood banks were opening broad new avenues for infection.

The dark side of progress is now unmistakable; many of the advances that have made our lives more comfortable have also made them more dangerous. Some 30 new diseases have cropped up since the mid-1970sÑcausing tens of millions of deathsÑand forgotten scourges have resurfaced with alarming regularity. Health experts declare that infectious diseases will continue to emerge and warn that complacency and inaction could lead to more contagion. So what is to be done? As the SARS outbreak has shown, surveillance is critical. By spotting new infections wherever they occur, and working globally to contain them, we can greatly reduce their impact. But is preparedness our ultimate weapon? Do we know enough about the genesis of new diseases to prevent them? Could we avert the next SARS? The next AIDS? What would a reasonable strategy look like?

A V I A N F L U Avian flu was thought to infect birds only until it jumped the species barrier in 1997. However, the transmission of the virus from birds to humans is a rare event.

We do not hold all the cards in this game. Most new diseases begin when a person catches something from an animalÑa transaction shaped by chance or even the weather. When healthy young adults started dying of a SARS-like syndrome in New Mexico 10 years ago, it took health experts several weeks of intensive lab work to identify the culprit. To the scientists' amazement, it wasn't a human pathogen at all. It was a novel member of the hantavirus family, a group of rodent viruses that sometimes spread through the air after rats or mice shed them in their urine. The previous outbreaks had occurred in Asia. So why were people dying in New Mexico? Scientists now believe the American mice had harboured the virus all along but had never been populous enough to scatter infectious doses in people's toolsheds and basements. What changed the equation that year was El Nino. The ocean disturbance caused an unusually warm winter in the southwest. The mouse population exploded as a result and the hantavirus got a free ride.

Until someone harnesses the jet stream, such accidents are sure to happen. But quirky weather is not the greatest threat we face. As ecologists study the causes of disease emergence, they are finding that human enterprise is a far more significant force. Almost any activity that disrupts a natural environment can enhance the mobility of disease-causing microbes. Consider what happened in the 1980s, when farmers in Venezuela's Portuguesa state cleared millions of acres of forest to create cropland. The farms drew as many rats and mice as people, and the rodents introduced a deadly new virus into the region. The so-called Guanarito virus causes fever, shock and haemorrhaging. It infected more than 100 people, leaving a third of them dead.

Malaysian pig farmers had a similar experience in 1999, after they started pushing back the forest to expand their operations. As barns replaced forestland, displaced fruit bats started living in the rafters, bombarding the pigs' drinking water with a pathogen now known as the Nipah virus. The pigs developed an explosive cough that became known as the one-mile cough because you could hear it from so far away. The virus soon spread from the pigs to their keepers, causing extreme brain inflammation and killing 40 per cent of the affected people. The outbreak ended when Malaysian authorities closed eight farms and slaughtered a million pigs.

H A N T A Hanta viruses are carried by rodents, especially the deer mouse. You can become infected by their droppings, and the first signs of sickness (fever and muscle aches) appear one to five weeks later.

The point is not that rain forests are dangerous. It is that blindly rearranging ecosystems can be hazardous to our health. That is where Lyme disease emerged, and it, too, is a product of the way we use our land. The bacterium that causes Lyme lives in the bodies of deer and white-footed mice, passing between those animals in the heads of biting ticks. People have crossed paths with all these critters for generations, yet the first known case of Lyme disease dates back only to 1975. Researchers tied the event to suburban development. In open woodlands, foxes and other predators keep a lid on the Lyme agent by hunting the mice that carry it. But the predators vanish when developers chop woodlands, and the mice and their ticks proliferate unnaturally.

The problem is particularly serious in the case of infections we get from primates and pigs. When the Ebola virus jumps from an ape into a person, it often races through a family or a hospital before burning itself out. And HIV is still spreading steadily after three decades of person-to-person transmission. It has infected some 60 million people since crossing over from chimpanzees, and its emergence was no fluke of the weather. We placed ourselves in the path of the virus, we moved it around the world, and we are well poised to do it again.

jsonline.com By JOHN SCHMID jschmid@journalsentinel.com Last Updated: May 20, 2003

From the political chaos in Saudi Arabia to terror anxieties in the United States, events are conspiring to elevate gasoline prices and add a new edge of nervousness in a stalled American economy. Economy

Photo/File An oil worker operates a valve gear at an installation near Baghdad, Iraq, in 2000. Crude oil prices fell in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, but recent terrorist bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, sent prices higher.

Graphic/Journal Sentinel Oil and the Economy's Health

Crude oil prices, which fell in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war and briefly lifted hopes that cheap fuel would drive a recovery in the U.S., have been rising again.

Benchmark crude prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange gained 45 cents, or 1.6%, settling Tuesday at $29.28 a barrel, the highest level in a month.

"This will short-circuit the decline in gasoline prices," said George Gaspar, energy analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee.

In a world that burns 75 million barrels of petroleum every day, experts agree that each spike in oil prices is the equivalent of tapping on the brakes of commercial activity.

"The world economies function a lot better at $18 a barrel than they do at the current price," said James Williams, president of Arkansas-based WTRG Economics, an energy analysis group.

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, falling crude oil prices were supposed to provide a much-needed boost to a war-weary nation. And for a brief time, it seemed they would.

World market prices for crude oil, which traded above $30 a barrel for much of the year, declined after the war to just above $25 per barrel.

But last week's terrorist bombings that rocked Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, have added new jitters to oil markets and sent prices higher. Adding to the nervous climate, Saudi and U.S. officials this week issued warnings to Americans at home and abroad to brace for more attacks. The federal government Tuesday raised the terrorism alert level to orange - meaning there is a high risk of a terrorist attack - as the U.S., Britain and Germany closed their embassies in the Saudi kingdom.

Volatility to stay

According to a rule of thumb, every $1 increase in crude prices amounts to a 2.5-cent rise in average unleaded pump prices. "So if prices just rose $5, you pay another 12 cents at the pump," Williams said.

The national price for regular unleaded fuel averages about $1.53 per gallon, Gaspar said.

Roller coaster oil prices illustrate another economic reality, as well. Oil prices, which are one of the most fundamental determinants of economic direction, have seldom been more volatile than they have been in the past two years.

And that volatility is here to stay, experts concur.

Political uncertainty extends well beyond Saudi Arabia. Of the 11 nations in the world's oil cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, four of them are in the throes of political instability: Venezuela is stricken with a political leadership crisis and strikes, Nigeria is battling civil strife, Iraq's chaos means a slower-than-expected resumption of oil exports, and Saudi Arabia now finds itself in the epicenter of the anti-terror war.

"We have to get used to the fact that we have a continuous period of unsettled political affairs around the world," said Mark Baskir, portfolio manager in New York for the energy fund at Strong Financial Corp.

"The bottom line is that the uncertainties are not going away any time soon and they are being factored into the price of oil."

Floor under prices

The advent of summer driving demand will keep a floor under gasoline prices, and so will low U.S. stocks of crude oil and gasoline, analysts said. "We have near-historic lows of supplies of oil," Baskir said.

"The point is that volatility and uncertainty will be the norm for some time to come," Williams said. Because the inventories are so low, the potential for prices to increase amid that volatility is greater than any potential decrease in prices, he and other economists said.

"Part of the optimism was that we won the war and people thought someone only needed to turn a valve and all this crude will come back on the market," Williams said, adding:

"It just doesn't work that way. It will be some time before Iraqi crude returns to the market."